Unconscious acts
by Mbard
Summary: What Sara wants and what she allows herself to have aren't necessarily the same thing.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: They are not mine so please don't sue.

A/N: This is my first Sassy fic and I'm not sure where it came from or if it works, but my muse struck in the middle of a staff meeting at work and I've learnt to obey whenever she comes knocking, so here's the result.

**Unconscious Acts**

Part One - Falling

Soft with a slight undercurrent of something sharp. Not unpleasant just acute in its expression, so what you first think you've experienced actually turns out to be something else. Related but different. Lingering long after the moment is over. Spiraling around your senses as you try to decipher the tones and nuances. Closing your eyes to the distractions of the lab only to reopen them and discover you are alone now anyway. There is no one there to pick you up should you fall.

It feels like you might fall sometimes. Gravity shall lose its tenacious hold on you and you'll tumble down backwards into the dark abyss your life sometimes feels like. You don't know when it started. When it was you first noticed how empty your apartment is after you crawl home in the dawn light. Flicking on the light switch by the front door automatically, as if illuminating all the empty shadows will chase the loneliness away. The shadows are gone but their empty echo still remains. Now every time you go home the falling sensation sweeps over you as you cross the threshold into that empty place. It never felt like this before you think as you switch on lights, flick the CD player on, deposit what take-out carton based meal you've picked up for the night on the pristine kitchen countertop. The silence was never this acute. Never so deafening in its insistence.

You always liked the solitude. The discipline and self-confidence it takes to feel comfortable to come home to an empty apartment night after night has escaped you. And no matter how hard you've looked you can't find where it is you left your old self.

She's not there at the lab. Your haven, your escape. The place if it didn't sound so desperate to utter the words, that you truly think of as home. Where the evidence makes sense. The pain it takes to understand the specimen before you comforting in its clinical embrace. But the experiments seem as empty as your apartment lately. The evidence has lost its meaning since you discovered how alone you feel at night. You want to turn around a corner one day and see your old self walking towards you, or see her crouched over the water fountain because the dry desert heat stifles a throat used to the ocean. You wish the next trip up the corridor would lead you to who you once were, who you once controlled. It only leads to dead ends.

And her.

All the paths you walk down lately seem to lead to her. Even ones that begin at a completely different point somehow weave their way to her, and like in the fairytale you look behind you, the trail of breadcrumbs you left to find your way back have disappeared. So you begin to question, was that the moment it happened? When everything you knew, everything you were sure of changed. Everything changed because instead of finding that which you used to be when you take those slow silent walks around the lab to clear your head, you found her.

And she smiled.

It was nothing more than that. She smiled at you, the edges of her soft pink lips curling up a little. Eyes that were usually clouded with thoughts and concerns about the latest case she was working looked a little less fraught, they appeared to change shade. She smiled at you and you began to change. How powerful a thing to encourage such a monumental shift in your perceptions. How incongruous that this could be initiated by a thing so innocent, so simple, as a smile.

And now you notice her more than you think you should. The cut of tight jeans accentuating firm flesh underneath. Her habit of wearing perfectly tailored shirts so you can catch glimpses of the shapely tanned body that lay hidden beneath. You find yourself contemplating things you long thought buried within you. It makes you blush when you catch yourself walking behind her in the lab. That swagger, those hips swaying before you make you feel things more than you think you should. Things you haven't felt since college. Since you thought you knew it all but soft hands and gentle caresses spoke that you knew nothing.

You watch for her coming in every day, an unconscious and natural a thing as breathing in and out. You make up lame excuses to be in the locker room at the same time. Not as voyeur to her unknowing display of everything that is missing from your life. You simply stand there and just breathe her in. The uniqueness of her scent mixing into your senses and lighting them on fire. It's soft with a slight undercurrent of something sharp. Not unpleasant just acute in its expression, so what you first think you've experienced actually turns out to be something else.

And you close your eyes to decipher these hidden signals from her. You allow yourself to dream that she could be the one to pick you up when you have fallen. You allow yourself to hope that she would never let you fall.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimers: I do not own them so please do not sue.

Part 2 - Ascending

It's a subtle sound. Purposeful but not intrusive. With its lifts and falls metered out perfectly in time. Recognisable instantly or maybe that's only because you have come to listen out for it in the lab. You wait for your day to begin with the echo of that sound. Strange that it went unnoticed before when now you can't start your day properly without hearing that indicative sound first. You wonder what you did before you knew, you marvel at the blind way you went about your interactions with people, never conscious of the background. And now the background is all you can think about. Listening out for that sound is an unconscious habit you don't remember beginning but now that you have, you find that it is a hard habit to break. You reflect that you don't want to break out of it and this leads you to question again who you were before this began to happen to you.

Or more accurately why hadn't it happened to you sooner?

The need in you to hear things others cannot hear, see what they have no idea is right before their eyes. It's all about perception. The one with the control is the one who can understand what is before them. You may not have all the answers yet but you are on the path to understanding the dynamic that's developed between the two of you. And you think you are a few steps ahead of her as it is you who listens for her footsteps every day, not the other way around.

Why else would you care so much?

And you do care. Oh you tell yourself it's professional courtesy when you call into the lab to check she is all right, after the latest case has left her solemn and introspective once she's gone from the interview room. You convince yourself that you are simply looking out for one of your own, the unspoken code amongst detective and CSI. No less a bond than the honour you sometimes encounter amongst thieves. But it's more than that what you feel for her. It's tangible, malleable. It's waiting to hear her walk into the lab and knowing by the way she carries herself which shoes she is wearing that day, even though you wouldn't have caught a glimpse of her yet. It's remembering the way she takes her coffee so you can surprise her in that nonchalant way you do when you offer her a cup and she finds it tastes exactly as she likes it. Sweet and black, so the sugar offsets the inherent bitterness of the dark bean. And you wonder if you can do the same for the bitterness she holds inside her that is plain to see on her face only no-ones seems to understand it but you.

They all think it's just part of what makes her so uniquely her, as though if they took a strand of her dark hair and held it under the microscope they'd see in her genetic makeup that she's always been this way. Focused and stoic, determined and slightly obsessive, alone but apparently at ease with the emptiness. But you can see past the exterior, it's what makes you such a damn good cop, and you see all the things that shroud her true self. You know how to look past the mask of dedication she wears every day to what's really hidden underneath. A scared animal trapped in a cage that would rather bite the hand that feeds them than let that same hand hurt them again.

You wonder if she's always been like this. Why you were the first to notice that there is something inherently wrong with an attractive young woman spending every available moment ensconced in a lab with no natural sources of light. Who doesn't talk about her life outside of work because for her, her life is her work, there is nothing outside it. She has no frame of reference outside these pristine walls. The glass she looks away from when she passes it, fearful of the reflection she would see if she stopped to look. You know the reasons why you became a CSI, how easy a decision it had been in the end to give in to the inevitable and follow in your mother's footsteps when you became a detective, but you wonder what drove her to this profession. Although the work satisfies such a brilliant analytical mind, sometimes where the evidence leads her you see a bolt of pain cross her eyes. Her cool exterior slips a moment and you think you see the un-asked question in her chocolate eyes – why?

It's a question you have been asking of yourself a lot lately, although in reference to something quite different than when you see it pass through her mind. You lay awake at night recalling your interactions with her from the day that is laying itself to rest, and you ask why did this happen to you? Why should it be you who sees what the others don't? Why do you have to be the one to question what secrets she is keeping buried under those layers of avoidance and sarcasm that have become her raison d'être? Why does your heart have to be the one to ache when you hear her walking away from you at the end of shift? Another malignant case solved and shelved, another reason for her to withdraw further from the real world into what she knows and trusts, but what ultimately, you think, leaves her empty and lifeless inside.

You ask yourself why, not because you think there is an answer but because you are fearful that you can't be what she needs. That you will somehow let her down when she finally allows you into her life. When that masks starts to fall and she lets you see the person who has always been hiding underneath, you think that you will do something wrong without meaning to, it will just happen. You'll say the wrong thing, push too hard or not hard enough and it will be over. The light you so want to make shine in her eyes shall be permanently extinguished and it shall be all your fault.

It's subtle, purposeful but not intrusive how she has found her way into your life. How she has made you listen out for her footsteps every day and examine relationships from your past that you thought were just a phase. You see the things that no-one else sees about her, a part of you knowing that is because she wants you to be the one that looks. And even though you fear you cannot be all that she needs, you hope that you are at least what she wants.


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: I don't own them so please don't sue me.

Part 3 - Colliding

It was only a matter of time. That's what you tell yourself over and over again as you try to make sense of you and her. _It was only a matter of time_. You think the words will bring you understanding. The clarity of thought you find easy to come by when working a case, following the evidence, has somehow deserted you when you need it the most. The evidence before you now, the sureness with which you think it was only a matter of time does not bring the comforting blanket of understanding you crave so much. In its stead is confusion, a gnawing sensation in your stomach that makes it difficult to eat. A frantic beat behind your eyes because you know it's right before you, plain to see, only you can't. Or maybe you just don't want to.

Because if you really stopped to examine the evidence laid bare on the shiny metal surface of your life the way you hover over the evidence tables in the lab, you're going to realise the truth you are trying to uncover about you and her is a four letter word. The one you don't believe in, well fuck you've never had reason to. How can you believe in something you can't see, touch, take scrapings from and scrutinise at the microscopic level? You just don't have that much faith, you're too scientific. The truth of something comes from the physical evidence left behind, at least that's what you learnt in college, what you practice every day on the job. What you refuse to apply now to you and her, even though there is enough trace of the physical left behind it would be easy for you to decipher the truth if you wanted to.

It's there in your empty lifeless apartment when you crawl home from another graveyard shift that you feel you worked through with your eyes closed. As soon as you open the door the lingering scent hits you, and you forget everything of the previous eight hours when you recall the last time you didn't come home alone.

It washes over you like a drug, the effects similar to intoxication when you remember smooth hands riding up the back of your shirt, clasping at the needy flesh beneath. That last time when the two of you collided together in desperate hunger for one another, you didn't even make it to the bedroom before she had you sprawled naked beneath her. The look in her cobalt eyes of pure intense longing that you at first thought couldn't be meant for you, but each time crimson lips came in union with your own, you began to accept her desire for you was real. As real as the fingertips that traced the curve of your waist, followed the indentation of your hip to edge ever closer to the need that ached between your legs that very last time she was here.

You stand with your back pressed to the door of the home you barely recognise now as your own, enveloped as it is with the traces of herself she left behind and you wrestle with the evidence that is before you. What it means to remember how it felt to be pulled into her warm embrace and experience a sense of belonging you'd never encountered before. How you can glance at the coffee table sat bare in the middle of the room and remember what broke the vase that had once adorned it. Feel the insistent hands on your body as if it were that time again and neither of you were looking which direction your fevered need was taking you until the loud smashing of glass pulled your attention away from each other for the briefest moment. The shy mischievous smirk she wore when she told you she'd buy you another one, and you replied fuck it, to which that smirk grew even wider as she responded that's what she was trying to do.

Echoes of that last time together seep out of the walls and permeate every inch of your apartment until you feel as though you can't breathe without breathing her in at the same time. And the truth of the two of you, what you were, what you are to each other now becomes even harder to ignore. The evidence is before you, colliding and beginning to make sense the way it does in the lab, and you know that the evidence never lies. So you lie to yourself. Thinking that it was only a matter of time before things fell apart. It's not true. It's just an excuse you came up with when you turned her away, and now you admonish yourself every day for the understanding that does not come when you utter those words to yourself.

Because those words are false. Telling them to yourself makes you a liar. It wasn't a matter of time before things fell apart you now realise with stark certainty, as you sit in your quiet apartment ignoring the tears that are gently falling from tired eyes. It was only a matter of time before you fell in love.


End file.
